Artikel
Editorial: September 2006
30 augustus 2006
Can we understand China today by reading the verse of internet aficionado, Yang Li? I mean more than intimating a sense of place (or hyper-space). With perhaps deliberate irony, Yang Li won’t say why he writes, but whatever the reason, his poetry is iconoclastic. As Simon Patton suggests, in his insightful discussion of the poet’s work, Li rejects craftsmanship in favour of a conversational style, directness and immediacy; poems are notes for bloggers, pared-down descriptions of the here and now, nothing could be more contemporary.
Moving on to India, we find self-deprecating Punjabi poet Nirupama Dutt, writing of sexual choice and guilt. She considers herself a member of the “roster of wicked women”. In ‘Laughing Sorrow’, she notes:
Thinking of my constraints
I will be ever so pained
blaming it all on my wretched
two affairs and a half
Rajendra Bhandari from Nepal asks philosophical questions: “How far is nirvana from the kerosene queue?” (‘From the market’) and combines the local and political with the existential to great effect. While grounded in the places he describes, his writing has universal appeal. I urge you to read his poem, ‘The Expanding Universe’.
Mark Boog from the Netherlands recently won the prestigious VSB prize and so the editor has updated his entry and added a slew of new poems. You should also visit the ‘Salt sequence’ animations of Boog's work, created by Poetry in Motion. The combination of the visuals with the sound track of the author reading is quite striking. Boog has invented his own philosophy which when not profound, borders on the humorous, a Dutch trait? “Happiness is surmountable” he writes in ‘Happiness’ from his latest collection, The Encyclopedia of Big Words.
To what extent this happiness determines us
is not even the question: absolutely. We are nothing
but our happiness, and happiness is where we are.
Italian poet Milo De Angelis is equally impressive – and again has a philosophical bent. His work contains many memorable lines, “Milan was asphalt, liquid asphalt” struck me. Or this:
The nations drown, the towers collapse, a chaos
of languages and colours, traumas and new loves,
enters Bovisasca, wipes out the masterful loneliness
of the twentieth century (untitled)
Our two poets from Ireland, Louis De Paor and Sinead Morrissey seem to have written versions of the same poem. “I know my parents made me by my hands.” writes Morrissey in 'Genetics'. And here is her fellow countryman, with 'Heredity':
There’s no denying
the blood that goes through me
from my mother’s side,
leaving one snarled tooth
in the roof of my mouth
Both poems share a common theme and imagination and yet leave quite a different impression on the reader.
Wherever in the world our poetry tour takes you, look beyond the geography - what do these writers tell us about the world today? In twenty years time, some young student will be reading these poems and bringing an entirely different interpretation to bear.
Recently I was leafing through an anthology of ‘contemporary’ poets, produced in the mid-1950s. The editor explains in her introduction that “the many trends result from the age we live in; in order to understand the poetry, we must try to understand the age.” This could also be inverted, I suppose – to understand the age, look at the poetry. But just twenty years can change our interpretation of things, the pencil notes of an assiduous student of this edition interpret WH Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’, written in the 1930s, as a demonstration of Teddy Boy ideology. Now, fifty years later, a student might just as easily make a skateboarder analogy. Our interpretations are coloured by the age we live in.
Luckily then for us, the poets in this edition of PIW are all contemporary, born between 1951 and 1972; some of them almost brand new, rebels in their own time. While we might have a good local understanding of our own age, we don’t necessarily have the same knowledge of place – globalisation has not yet run its course. Can we understand China today by reading the verse of internet aficionado, Yang Li? I mean more than intimating a sense of place (or hyper-space). With perhaps deliberate irony, Yang Li won’t say why he writes, but whatever the reason, his poetry is iconoclastic. As Simon Patton suggests, in his insightful discussion of the poet’s work, Li rejects craftsmanship in favour of a conversational style, directness and immediacy; poems are notes for bloggers, pared-down descriptions of the here and now, nothing could be more contemporary.
Moving on to India, we find self-deprecating Punjabi poet Nirupama Dutt, writing of sexual choice and guilt. She considers herself a member of the “roster of wicked women”. In ‘Laughing Sorrow’, she notes:
Thinking of my constraints
I will be ever so pained
blaming it all on my wretched
two affairs and a half
Rajendra Bhandari from Nepal asks philosophical questions: “How far is nirvana from the kerosene queue?” (‘From the market’) and combines the local and political with the existential to great effect. While grounded in the places he describes, his writing has universal appeal. I urge you to read his poem, ‘The Expanding Universe’.
Mark Boog from the Netherlands recently won the prestigious VSB prize and so the editor has updated his entry and added a slew of new poems. You should also visit the ‘Salt sequence’ animations of Boog's work, created by Poetry in Motion. The combination of the visuals with the sound track of the author reading is quite striking. Boog has invented his own philosophy which when not profound, borders on the humorous, a Dutch trait? “Happiness is surmountable” he writes in ‘Happiness’ from his latest collection, The Encyclopedia of Big Words.
To what extent this happiness determines us
is not even the question: absolutely. We are nothing
but our happiness, and happiness is where we are.
Italian poet Milo De Angelis is equally impressive – and again has a philosophical bent. His work contains many memorable lines, “Milan was asphalt, liquid asphalt” struck me. Or this:
The nations drown, the towers collapse, a chaos
of languages and colours, traumas and new loves,
enters Bovisasca, wipes out the masterful loneliness
of the twentieth century (untitled)
Our two poets from Ireland, Louis De Paor and Sinead Morrissey seem to have written versions of the same poem. “I know my parents made me by my hands.” writes Morrissey in 'Genetics'. And here is her fellow countryman, with 'Heredity':
There’s no denying
the blood that goes through me
from my mother’s side,
leaving one snarled tooth
in the roof of my mouth
Both poems share a common theme and imagination and yet leave quite a different impression on the reader.
Wherever in the world our poetry tour takes you, look beyond the geography - what do these writers tell us about the world today? In twenty years time, some young student will be reading these poems and bringing an entirely different interpretation to bear.
© Michele Hutchison
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